The transmission of video streams (e.g., High Definition (“HD”) television programming, Internet video conferencing) often requires video encoding and decoding operations. In many cases, video encoding and decoding operations use video codecs (COmpressor-DECompressor). Video codecs are compression algorithms designed to encode/compress and decode/decompress video data streams to reduce the size of the streams for faster transmission and smaller storage space. While lossy, current video codecs attempt to maintain video quality while compressing the binary data of a video stream. A video stream comprises a sequence of video frames.
An encoder can sample video frames at different rates. Generally, a higher frame sampling rate translates to a higher quality video stream. However, high frame sampling rates make real time encoding of video streams impracticable or difficult. Processors often are unable to encode and transmit all the frames in real time (e.g., such as during video conferencing) because encoding operations are often computationally rigorous. Furthermore, processors often perform other applications while performing the encoding operation, which limits the processor's computing resources that can be allocated to the encoding operation.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for optimizing and changing the frame sampling rates during an encoding operation (e.g., during a video conference). Ideally, such an optimization method should ensure that video streams are encoded and transmitted in real time.